Poem: Anne Carson

Anne Carson

If you were to list the iconic works of American visual art, Edward Hopper's (1882-1967) "Nighthawks," with its unforgettable glimpse into the clear panes of a brightly lit all-night West Village diner, would most certainly have to be included. "Nighthawks" (1942) is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which describes its history and backstory like this:

Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” but the image—with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative—has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist’s wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”

Jeremiah Moss, who started the Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog, chronicling hyper-gentrification's dramatic transformation of New York City over the last two decades, and who last year published a companion volume, Vanishing New York: Now a Great City Lost Its Soul, devoted several posts back in summer 2010 and again in 2013 to figuring out which buildings in Manhattan might have served as a model for "Nighthawks." He concluded that there was no diner, and that Hopper had drawn more upon his imagination than anything else.

I have to say, though, that although there may have been on strict model at the spot or spots Hopper stated, or where Moss conjectured the diner might have stood, I can attest to having walked past similar spots, late at night in the late 1980s and especially in the late 1990s, on my way back from NYU, and unconsciously picturing an analogue to Hopper's scene. It captures a fundamental truth, transformed into a memorable image (would we call it a meme today?), about US urban life, especially during the mid-20th century, the isolation amidst connection, in a commercial space, outside the constraints of conventional normative time.

In the painting the figures are all white and could be viewed as a quasi-community or family, though all appear to be operating in semi-separate spheres of existence; but they aren't a heteronormative nuclear family, they aren't sitting down to dinner with kids, and three of them, at least at first glance, are not at work. Or are they? (The man behind the counter is.) There is a timelessness (outside of daily time) to the painting's image, a feeling almost outside of time, and, speaking of feeling, a tone of loneliness, perhaps even sadness, hovering over everything. And yet the diner's bright lights suggest a harbor amid the surrounding darkness.

Poet, European Classics scholar, artist, and performer Anne Carson might not be the first person who comes mind to be writing a poem about "Nighthawks," since he focus so often are stories drawn from the European Classical storehouse, but she included the one below in her collection Men in the Off Hours, whose title seems also to gesture towards Hopper's painting. There is a sense of "off hours" being depicted, not just in the painting but in the poem. Carson's poem is operating on multiple levels, with paralleling throughout, from the stanzas' ladderlike appearance to the mirroring of the end words, or teleutons, with rhyming when the words are not exact. "Shadows" and "widows" connect figuratively as well.

Carson has created a story about at least two of the figures, the flame-haired woman and the man sitting beside her, and the brief poem shares this narrative. One could imagine others, but Carson emphasizes it with her repetition of the lines, suggesting a passion that has taken the participants out of time--"off hours"--providing a foundation for this reading this by breaking through the poem's chief voice with the disorienting quote from St. Augustine's Confessions. "Time...were not" as the lovers have run away and figured out what their relationship meant, yet the distances have found them--this (homeo)stasis preserved, for all time now, in Hopper's painting and in Carson's poem.

"NIGHTHAWKS," 1942

by Anne Carson

I wanted to run away with you tonight

but you are a difficult woman
the rules of you—
Past and future circle round us
       now we know more now less
            in the institute of shadows.

            On the street black as widows
       with nothing to confess
our distances found us
the rules of you—
so difficult a woman
I wanted to run away with you tonight.

Yet I say boldly that I know that if nothing passed
                              away, time past were not.
And if nothing were coming, time future were not.
And if nothing were, time present were not.
                         (Augustine, Confessions XI)

Anne Carson, from Men in the Off Hours, New York: Vintage Contemporary Poetry, 2001. All rights reserved.

Hopper's painting:

Edward Hopper, "Nighthawks," 1942, oil on canvas 84.1 x 152.4 cm (33 1/8 x 60 in.) signed l.r. "Edward Hopper" Friends of American Art Collection, 1942.51, Art Institute of Chicago

New Directions' 80th Birthday Party at Greenlight Books

The sandwich board announcing
the event (Photo by Sachyn Mital)

In 1936, while still an undergraduate student at Harvard College, James Laughlin, the heir to a steel company fortune and a poet himself, founded a publishing company devoted to experimental and innovative literature in his dormitory room. 80 years later, that small house, New Directions Publishing Corporation, now headquartered in Manhattan, is still around and still marking out new territory in the literary world, with a position as one of the major American publishers of non-US and non-Anglophone literature. It is hardly hyperbole to say that New Directions has influenced peers, spawned successors, and played a vital role in transforming the landscape of US and global literature.

From perennial favorites like Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Herman Hesse to Modernists like H.D. and William Carlos Williams, to Nobel Laureates Boris Pasternak, Octavio Paz and Tomas Tranströmer, to Pulitzer Prize winners Tennessee Williams and Gary Snyder, to less well known international figures like Rene Philoctète, Raja Rao and Inger Christiansen, to singular figures like Robert Walser, W. G. Sebald and Fleur Jaeggy, to contemporary literary pathblazers like Kamau Brathwaite, Susan Howe, Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, Nathaniel Mackey, and Jenny Erpenbeck, New Directions has kept up the cause of writing that challenges and resets expectations and conventions. I personally feel quite fortunate to have become one of the writers on their rich and expansive (1500+) roster!

Yesterday at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New Directions held a celebration for its 80th anniversary that featured six writers offering toasts in various forms, with readings included, for no more than three minutes each. The lineup consisted of yours truly, who went first; Rivka Galchen, whose The Little Labors appeared just weeks ago; Eliot Weinberger, whose new nonfiction collections The Ghosts of Birds and Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei are forthcoming this fall; Bernadette Mayer, whose newest collection of poetry, Works and Days, will be issued this summer; Anne Carson, whose The Albertine Workout was a standout among its 2014 pamphlet series; and László Krasznahorkai, the great Hungarian novelist, whose previous New Directions book, which won him and his translator Ottilie Mulzet the 2014 Best Translated Book Prize, is one I consider to be one of the greatest works of 21st century literature so far, Seiobo There Below. (Krasznahorkai also received the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, and has two books, in one volume, forthcoming from New Directions this fall: The Last Wolf, and Herman I: The Game Warden & Herman II: The Death of a Craft.)

Group portrait: L-R: László Krasznahorkai, Bernadette Mayer,
me, Rivka Galchen, Lauri Callahan, Mieke Chew (crouching),
Barbara Epler, Eliot Weinberger, Georgia Phillips-Amos,
Anne Carson, Tynan Kogane, Chris Wait, ND friend, ND Friend,
Declan Spring, ND friend (Photo by Sachyn Mital)

After a warm introduction by Mieke Chew, New Directions' Co-Director of Publicity, in which she introduced all the staff members present, we each read. I actually included a toast and read from the final page of "Rivers"; Rivka Galchen read from two different New Directions authors, including Stevie Smith; Eliot read a distilled version of an erotic poem to goddesses, dedicating it to ND's "goddesses"; Bernadette read two short poems, including one with hip hop rhymes; Anne Carson read two footnotes from The Albertine Workout, and her "Epithalamium," or marriage poem, to her husband, who was present; and finally, closing the event out, László Krasznahorkai--whom I gushed to in the back as he was signing books and with whom, after the event ended, I briefly chatted about Gerald Murnane's study of Hungarian--delivered a concise, lyrical and enigmatic poem of abnegation, in which he suggested that he would give up everything. Except New Directions! It was the most fitting end to the reading one could imagine.

Afterwards the large crowd filled the bookstore and spilled out onto Fulton Street, enjoying the champagne, the writers, and books, the marvelous Brooklyn evening. It was a special delight for me to see some of our Rutgers-Newark MFA students and recent graduates, including Laura Spence-Ash and Evan Gill Smith, there! Among the people I had the pleasure of chatting with were critic Christopher Byrd, and John Madera, a writer and the force behind the Franklin Park Reading Series. Many thanks to my dear friend, author and filmmaker David Barclay Moore, who came to the reading and afterwards showed me a perfect little wine bar not far away that I'll have to head back to in the future.

Barbara Epler, at center, and Bernadette
Mayer, at right (with cane),
(Photo by Sachyn Mital)

Gayatri Spivak & Anne Carson @ NYU

This blog post's title suggests that in some strange confluence two eminent contemporary figures, Gayatri Spivak and Anne Carson, perhaps appeared together at New York University. But that was not the case. This past Thursday, both Spivak and Carson spoke at New York University, though they did so at completely different venues. I do wonder what it would be like to bring them together; what might the points of connection and contact be? Where might their thought intersect? Have they read each other? Something tells me that given the prominence of Spivak's theoretical production and Carson's poetry, perhaps they have at least familiarized themselves, however briefly, with each other's work.

Spivak delivered a talk entitled "Democracy and Representation" that Arjun Appadurai introduced and which NYU's Department of Media, Culture, and Communication hosted, with additional funding from the NYU Africana Studies Program, the Comparative Literature Department, and the Anglophone Project in the English Department. Ostensibly her aim was to speak about the problem of political representation in light of structures and practices international democracy, through a discussion of the late Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected leader of a free Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), who Belgian forces, in collusion with the United States, assassinated shortly after he took office. Her talk was then to shift into a discussion of a new "epistemology for engaging the contemporary by working through the inter-animation between postcoloniality and democracy." She in fact did talk about these issues, but she also spoke extensively, sometimes in Bengali, about her projects working with subalterns in India, and she offered informative sallies, often brimming with generosity, of a range of issues, including the relationship between "democracy" and social justice, the role of ancestor worship in Raoul Peck's Lumumba versus Jacques Brassine's deeply flawed colonialist post-colonial documentary Spectres, Belgium's and European colonization's roles in the spread of HIV in Congo, the reality of "sustained underdevelopment," and the Occupy Movement.


One aspect of her talk that I found most compelling was her discussion of her efforts toward what she called "supplementing vanguardism," which is to say, helping to create a subaltern intellectual, in terms that Antonio Gramsci articulated a century ago. As she noted, she has aimed for "intellectual labor conversations," viewing her work in part as "using intellectual labor to produce intellectual labor in students," moreso than merely imparting information. This, one might say, is part ofthe knew epistemology she was trying to fashion. She went on to talk about this work as "epistemological performance," and, against the obsession with STEM, talked about the necessity for a "training of the imagination," an "aesthetic imagination," which she correlated with "the humanities at work." She also juxtaposed this with the growing systematization and statistization of human development measurement, urging that it be supplemented by the humanities, that a different approach from that of "capital and colony" be taken into account, that we engage in "imaginative activism." As part of her broader critique, she noted that "underdevelopment" did not begin with capitalist colonization, and that this would be clearer if we moved questions of development away from the statistical development model, but that one way to do this was through this imaginative activism, utilizing the power of the humanities at work, but this must entail going beyond mere "activist writing," which could become self-referential and self-satisfied, but have few direct or practical effects for subalterns engaged in struggle. Moreover, political passion alone cannot suffice either. As she said, and as we know just from US history, organization, coalition building, direct action, and other forms of mobilization beyond immediate demands and protests for action, are necessary; "political passion, even when it is incandescent, cannot lead to permanent political structures." (Gramsci, I believe, thinking about Croce.)

There was one moment toward the end when a questioner asked Spivak to explain an incredibly complex formulation that she had made in her talk, and warned the audience about in terms of its difficulty, and, as I have seen her do now many times of the years (at the University of Virginia, at Northwestern, etc.), she basically diagrammed her formulation such that it was not only comprehensible but almost dizzying once you realized what she was saying. I will only say that it involved a formulation about reproductive heteronormativity and its relation to the autonormativity of ideas. At any rate, she returned several times during the Q&A to her emphasis on the necessity of training the imagination to think what is not there, to resisting the impulse to think only of oneself, to using whatever tools--including our two hands--to produce resistance, and to praising the emergence of structures and entities like the Khan Academy, which she nevertheless said must be supplemented by "imaginative training." There was a brief, powerful quote she uttered that I repeated at the MoCADA event, with attribution to her, about how Gramsci noted that "the subaltern is denied the right to abstraction." A great deal of what she has done and continues to do is to challenge this idea, to show and make possible access, among subaltern peoples, to "abstraction," the tools of social justice and liberation. There is, she noted, good and bad in everything; how to understand the difference, and make use of the better aspects of what's around us, including abstract structures such as democracy, money, the law, particularly in the face of the increasing subalternization of the 99%, remains the challenge. This reminds me of Clay's speech to Lula at the end of Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, in which he tell Lula how dangerous he and other black people could be if they use the Enlightenment tools, chiefly reason, instead of sublimating their oppression and transforming it into art. How to use those tools, without losing sight of that aesthetic dimension, is part of what Spivak spoke so evocatively and persuasively about that night.


Having written all of that about Spivak, I must admit that I have less to say about Anne Carson, though she was no less invigorating, in a different way. The MacArthur Foundation Fellow and NYU Distinguished Poet-in-Residence received an affirmative introduction by NYU Creative Writing Program head Joanne Landau, and, it turns out, was reading for the first time in a while at NYU without her husband and frequent collaborator, Robert Currie. She primarily read from her latest work Red Doc> (Knopf, 2013), which takes up the thread of Geryon, the strange, red, unforgettable monster-child from her earlier work, the brilliant novel-in-verse The Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998), but she also read assorted older and newer work, including one of the best things I've ever heard from her, one of her dialogues titled "Krapp House," in which she imagines Samuel Beckett's eponymous protagonist from his play Krapp's Last Tape conducting TV interviews various notable historical figures and literary characters. In the "Krapp House" interview she read, Krapp was interviewing Helen of Troy, who made a monstrous choice of her own--captured women vs. her dog; I'll leave J's Theater readers to figure out what Helen did, but let it be said that Carson can treat the profundity of horror, self-absorption, and ethical quandaries, among so many other things, as well as anyone. She ended the event with participatory short talks that were like delicious candies handed out to all who attended. Few writers can bring the house up, then down, then back up again, as deftly as she can. I now will keep my eye ready for announcements about new performances of Red Doc> or anything else she and "Currie," as she called him, are up to.

Poem (Novel Excerpt): Anne Carson

One of the things about original artists is that it sometimes takes a while for their work to be assimilated by the wider culture, if that ever occurs. Sometimes it does, at least to some extent, at other times it doesn't, and in their time, the critics will often ride their same hobbyhorses and commonplaces, usually championing what they know and venturing occasionally a bit out to inspect, with some people being completely passed over except by their peers, or some cases, by peers from generations to come.  An artist whose work suggested to me from the very first that she was an original presence is Anne Carson (1950-). I read her extraordinary collection Glass, Irony and God (New Directions, 1995) immediately when it came out--with its introduction, as if it needed one, by the utterly original and still passed-over Guy Davenport--with stupefaction. Here was a writer whose poetry looked like, well, no one else's I'd seen before, at least no one else really of her time, even as it was in conversation with many works of the past and present. (Just as startling was her 1997 essay in The Threepenny Review, "Economy, Its Fragrance." I remember talking about that piece for weeks on end with writers I knew; its aroma lingers still.)  Carson also published another strikingly original book that year, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Knopf, 1995), and, I learned in those days before the internet as we know it, an idiosyncratic scholarly study, Eros, the Bittersweet, with Princeton University Press in 1988 that pointed, in its strangeness, to what would appear 7 years later.

Carson has gone on to become one of the best known poets in the English language. She is widely acclaimed, has won many major awards (though not, unfortunately, the Pulitzer Prize), and now teaches at New York University after having spent many years at McGill University and later the University of Michigan teaching the classics, the area of her training and the subject of many of her critical texts and foundation of many of her creative works. Earlier this year I blogged about her most recent gift to the literary world, yet another utter originality, her accordion-printed elegy-in-a-box, Nox (New Directions, 2011), which is, I felt and feel, less a poem than a poetic performance and artifact. I shall leave it to others to interpret that. Instead, I am posting a snippet from Carson's novel-and-myth in poetry, one of her finest works, the Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998), which allegedly retells, as only Carson can, the Greek lyric poet Stesichoros's (632/629 BCE-556/553 BCE) story of Geryon, a queer little red monster. Of course "retells" is a really reductive way of describing what Carson does, which is to animate a distant world with elements drawn from our own, but with such metaphorical and imagistic power that it is a completely new world we both recognize and view in awe altogether.  One of Carson's key skills in all her work is her capacity to, as the Russian formalists described it, enstrange, to make the familiar so strange that it feels new, and the strange and new oddly familiar that we imagine we can, at some level, grasp it.

Here is a one little snippet from Autobiography of Red describing a moment nearly every mother faces but in such a way that it feels as if it were conjured from a mind running on a different track. Enjoy!

V. SCREENDOOR

His mother stood at the ironing board lighting and cigarette and regarding Geryon.
  -----

Outside the dark pink air
was already hot and alive with cries. Time to go to school, she said for the third time.
Her cool voice floated
over a pile of fresh tea towels and across the shadowy kitchen to where Geryon stood
at the screen door.
He would remember when he was past forty the dusty almost medieval smell
of the screen itself as it
pressed its grid onto his face.  She was behind him now. This would be hard
for you if you were weak
but you're not weak, she said and neatened his little red wings and pushed him
out the door.

Anne Carson, from Autobiography of Red, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Copyright © by Anne Carson, 1998. All rights reserved

Memorial Day + Anne Carson's Nox + My First Literary Agent, the Crack Addict + Gordimer on Books & Libraries

A listing of all the young women and men soldiers who've lost their lives in the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (CNN.com: US and Coalition Casualties)

A op-chart graphic on the dead and unknown dead in the US's wars, from today's New York Times, by Robert M. Poole and Rumors presents the country's military history in a metaphorically arresting, unforgettable way. (Cf. above, at right, and click on the link for the larger view.)

Finally, here's a Memorial Day post written by veteran and progressive Todd Theise, who's running against Democorporatist Scott Garrett in New Jersey's Fifth Congressional District.  (H/t Digby!)

* * *

Memorial Day concerns remembering, memorializing and, to some extent, grieving, which brings me to the lone book not associated with any aspect of my teaching, writing, committee work, or university visitors that I've managed to read over the last 3 months, and it took just an evening: poet and classical scholar Anne Carson's extraordinary new work, which I will not call a book of poetry, though it is a highly poetic book, Nox (New Directions, 2010). The book has been covered extensively around the Net, so I'll describe it in a few words: in the way that only Carson can, the book combines an elegy to her deceased brother (the dedication, to "Michael," is "Nox Frater Nox" (or Night Brother Night), and a record of her translation of a particularly difficult Catullus elegy, Poem 101, "Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus." She translates the opening line as "Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed," and the rest of this short poem, a little beyond halfway through the book, surrounding it with a variety of other texts. There's a method that's quickly discernible: on the left pages, she usually (but not always) places lexical entries for each word in the Catullus poem, and on the right side, she features journal entries, snippets of notes to herself, very brief poems, visual images by and of herself, and sometimes of her brother, her own artworks, or any of these elements in collaged combination.

In and of themselves, these aspects of the book, especially by a writer of genius like Carson, would make for a worthwhile read, but the real showstopper is the book's physical form. The designer Robert Currie assisted Carson in creating the sort of affordable book-as-art you rarely see today (and sadly, especially at a time when physical books are facing possible disappearance as digital technologies increasingly dominate). The pages are full color, at times nearly convincing you that you're looking at Carson's journals instead of photographs of them, and the entire book is printed in accordion fashion, as the photos below show, and then placed in a gray oystershell box, which serves as a perfect bed for the reader to flip through it and enjoy it. You can lift it out of its box, of course, like an oyster, and it expands like a bellows, but having handled it a bit, it works fine either way.  For weeks, as the pressure to get through mounds of fiction kept growing, I found myself stopping and examining this work every time I was in the bookstore (always a refuge for me), and eventually, as I was dawdling amid a stack of stories, I picked up a copy. Despite its format, the book falls within the current price range for hardcover books, at $29.95. It reminds me of another remarkable, widely available work, British postmodernist B. S. Johnson's (1933-1973) 1969 novel The Untouchables, which consists of 27 sections held together by a removable wrapper and placed in a similar clamshell box. In the UK Secker and Warburg originally published this work, and Picador published the British reissue in 2008, while New Directions published the US version.